Microsoft XNA is a set of tools with a managed runtime environment provided by Microsoft that facilitates video game development and management. XNA attempts to free game developers from writing "repetitive boilerplate code" and to bring different aspects of game production into a single system.
The XNA toolset was announced March 24, 2004, at the Game Developers Conference in San Jose, California. A first Community Technology Preview of XNA Build was released on March 14, 2006. XNA Game Studio 2.0 was released in December 2007, followed by XNA Game Studio 3.0 on October 30, 2008. XNA Game Studio 4.0 was released on September 16, 2010 along with the Windows Phone 7 Development Tools.
XNA currently encompasses Microsoft's entire Game Development Sections, including the standard Xbox Development Kit and XNA Game Studio.
The name "XNA" originated out of the project's development name, Xbox New Architecture. Instead of being released under the Xbox name, the Xbox 360 was released (2005), and XNA came to stand for "XNA's Not Acronymed".
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This is fresh in Update #43:
- Display info icons during colony placement
- Trade discounts and surcharges
- Ocean district
- UI improvements for research, colony shares and workshop
- List of gameplay improvements
- New rendering system for buildings and world objects
Colony Placement
Placing a new colony or frontier building now displays icons on the surrounding fields. The represent the quality of the area by highlighting deserts, fields with high fertility, fossil or rare resources and more.
Trade Discounts
The price of resources and items always depends on who you are trading with. Space merchants and tech traders will charge a fee that makes buying more expensive and selling less lucrative. Natives and midras on the other side don't know a lot about space market prices and often sell stuff very cheap.
Other colonists, finally, link their pricing to your diplomatic relation. This means it can be very powerful to have a good relation towards another company.
Ocean District
This new district is now made available in the Lorian mission.
The ocean district can be built on coast fields and the open sea. Districts have to be linked to others who connect with the shore.
Microplastic collectors clean the seas and recover goods by filtering floating plastic, other waste and impurities from the water.
Ocean thermal energy conversion uses the temperature difference between cooler deep sea and warmer surface water to meet part of the energy demand.
UI Improvements
Research
- Only display elements of buildings that are already available (the buildings don't have to be licensed, though)
- Highlight research options by improved category: energy, food, goods, income, emissions
Colony Share Trading
- Take-over of a city no longer needs at least 50% of shares
- Clearly display the player's stake in another colony
- Tooltip with transaction fee and expected dividend
Workshop
- Unite different item categories in single panel with scroll bars
Other UI Stuff
- Added "mission failed" dialog to competitions
- Highlight when an opposing faction is almost winning the competition
- "Back" buttons in game are now called "resume game" to make it more clear
- Infrastructure buildings now have gray icons
Gameplay
- In competition and free play other factions will no longer wait until you have placed your first city center
- Forests and other plants regrow much faster now after being harvested or burning
- Increased number of default tech licenses in competition and free play
Graphics & Tech
We have completely rewritten our rendering system for buildings and other world objects:
- Improved render performance
- Much nicer animations
- More powerful particle effects
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It's not an engine, its a framework basically a template to directX. I really like it because it allows you to develop for 3 Microsoft platforms and can port them easily.
Jul 14 2012 by atsebak
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I have uploaded some open-source XNA 4.0 projects on my downloads page here: Indiedb.com
I will be uploading more projects there later over time. Happy Coding :-D
Finally! MonoGame is coming to Xbox One. MonoGame implements XNA 4.0 and allows developers to port their games to other platforms besides the default platforms supported already by the XNA 4.0 Framework. Link: Twitter.com
Also, I need to correct myself on an older post. Unity has Mono built into it, not MonoGame. So if you are eager to finish your XNA game, with some work, it is possible to import your XNA or MonoGame project into Unity. Mono is a cross-platform open source implementation of Microsoft's .NET Framework. It is based on the ECMA standards for C# and the Common Language Runtime.
With MonoGame 3.4 (which is the continuation of XNA 4.0) for Visual Studio 2015, it is now possible to create a game for Universal Windows Platform (UWP). This also makes it possible to get your XNA project to run on Windows 10 with UWP. Since the Xbox One dev kit supports UWP, it might also be possible to get a MonoGame project running on it.
Awesome :P
If anyone is curious, it is possible to integrate your XNA Game Project into Unity, but it might take a little extra work. This is a proof of concept showing the Platformer XNA starter kit running inside Unity3D. Zero code changes have been made to the original game code. Using a mixture of new code and some code from MonoGame, the author has implemented XNA emulation. They did so by having a game object with a script attached run an XNA game performing updates and drawing.
Check out this link below for the source code:
Github.com
Interesting but what about the performance? I persume it would drop radically under such conditions.
My apologies for replying back so late. Under such conditions, it is possible for the frame-rate to drop. By performance, are you referring to graphics specifically? I sometimes rarely hear people speak of physics performance or audio performance. Honestly it depends how the XNA game was coded prior to being imported into Unity. It would be best to fix garbage collection issues in your XNA game project before importing it into Unity. There are many ways to help increase performance in your XNA project prior to importing it into Unity. Its a question of whether or not you are CPU or GPU bound. Using the CLR Profiler can help you find out. Things like changing foreach loops to for, multi-threading, using StringBuilder instead of String, and using DrawUserPrimitives are just some ways to help the frame-rate. In my game constructor, I set the following to false: IsFixedTimeStep = false; and graphics.Synchr
(Sorry for the double post. I didn't realize that I was logged out)
No problem. Yes, I was referring to the graphics performance.
You mentioned DrawUserPrimitives(). So far I have only used it in 3D with Vector3. Do you use DrawUserPrimitives in 2D as well? If so are you still using a Vector3 and just projecting 3D data on an orthographic view? Do you know if vector2 can be used with vertecies and triangles?
Thanks.
For drawing primitives in 2D, you really just need to know what to tell the system to make it work. Check out this great tutorial for more information. I hope it will further answer your questions as it has helped me.
Bit-101.com
I checked the link you posted, after seeing it I remembered that I checked the same blog long ago (might be a couple of years ago). Turns out the author is talking about what I was refering in my comment. Projecting Vector3 vertecies on an orthographic view. It was good to read it again. Thanks a lot for the reply and the link.
Cheers!
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nice! :D